What’s in a Name?
A livelihood, if that name is Banksy.
The artist known as Banksy has made a fortune in graffiti and irony and ironic graffiti. No, he’s not the guy—we now know that Banksy is a middle-aged Englishman named Robin Gunningham—who taped a banana to the wall with silver duct tape. (Maurizio Cattelan sold Comedian at a Sotheby’s auction in 2024 for $6.2 million.) Nor is he responsible for the pair of glasses left on the floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a stunt that the museum took in stride as a Marcel Duchamp-style prank. (The culprits were 17-year olds who in the spirit of “I could have made that” passed off the glasses as art.) Or the two men who, just weeks after the October 2025 Louvre heist, smuggled a fake painting into the museum, a portrait of the two “artists” in Renaissance garb in a frame made of Legos, and hung it on a gallery wall. They filmed themselves and the stunt, of course, went viral.
This kind of sophomoric nonsense makes Banksy’s work seem downright profound. Perhaps his most infamous work was “Love Is in the Bin,” a framed painting from 2006 of a girl with a heart-shaped balloon. In 2018, it sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $1.4 million. At the close of the sale, a remote-controlled switch lowered the work through a shredder in the lower part of the picture frame. To great fanfare, the venerable auction house declared the piece an “art intervention” and described it as “the first artwork in history to have been created live during an auction.” Sotheby’s resold the work in 2021, its partially shredded portion hanging below the frame and the “decommissioned, remote controlled shredding mechanism” still in place. Price: $25.4 million.
Surrealism and Dada put irony in art front and center. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp signed a porcelain urinal R. Mutt and called it Fountain. This introduced the idea of everyday artifacts—readymades—as potential art objects. It also drew attention to the perfection of form of a mass produced object; the practical purpose of Fountain confounded received notions of beauty, hence the joke. René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe / This is not a pipe (1929) is a painting of a pipe. The actual name of the painting is La Trahison des images, or The Treachery of Images, a Surrealist play on words, pitting image against text. (Magritte’s titles offer a digest of non sequiturs, double entendres, and just plain odd ideas.) In 1936, Méret Oppenheim covered a teacup and saucer in fur and titled it Le Déjeuner en fourrure (Fur Breakfast), later Object. Considered the quintessential Surrealist object, the work came out of a joke over lunch with Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, and his mistress Dora Maar. (In the 1930s, Picasso’s Cubist portraits of Maar were controversial, to say the least, inciting countless psychological assessments of both artist and muse.) Two years later, trickster par excellence Salvador Dalí created a sculpture of a lobster perched on the handset of a real telephone and called it Lobster Telephone. According to the Tate London, “Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotations for Dalí.” (What didn’t?)
Banksy’s art is, let’s just say, less ambitious than the pioneering ironists of the twentieth century. His imagery is derivative (mostly created with stencils), his sense of humor arch, and his style a mixture of the playful and political. The setting of his art is its most salient quality. In 2022, he did a series of murals at the ruins of buildings in Ukrainian towns. Finding ways to transform the horrific scenes of war into whimsical settings for everyday activities such as bathing, riding a seesaw, or practicing martial arts calls for a very British kind of daring cheekiness. Add the possibility that the work will be lost when the building is demolished or rehabilitated and Banksy finds himself in the surprising position of an artist exploring traditional ideas of transience and emotional resonance in the most unlikely of places.
Banksy has always had a cavalier attitude toward his art’s value. It would, after all, be hopelessly bourgeois to care about art as a cultural object. Today’s art market is ridiculously over-inflated, buoyed up by collectors whose incredible wealth keeps prices high and art invisible inside their well-protected compounds. In this atmosphere, questions of art’s value and artists’ motivations become warped and distorted. Culture and consumerism become indistinguishable. In 2005, Banksy captured this attitude with Show Me the Monet, a “remix” painting in which the French Impressionist’s famous Giverny waterlilies and Japanese bridge were reimagined with a traffic cone and two abandoned grocery carts. (Sold at Sotheby’s for 7.5 million British pounds.)
The emergence of non-traditional currency and digital art forms further complicates art’s value. Beeple (real name Mike Winkelmann) is a graphic designer who has turned much of his artwork into NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Beeple/Winkelmann sold an NFT of his Everydays: The First 5000 Days in 2021 for $69.3 million. The complete work is a collage of images made every day over thirteen years; many reflect personal experience (one was made at 5am in a matter of minutes right before he drove his wife to the hospital to give birth), some were inspired by current events, some are little more than doodles. The revelation that Mike Winkelmann is Beeple seems to have had little or no effect on his earning capacity.
What of that of Banksy? As the Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Crow noted, “the marketplace tends to reward clarity,” and collectors want to know as much as possible about a potential purchase. That used to be verifiable as provenance, or learning about an artwork’s history in order to establish its authenticity and its place in the artist’s life and work. Banksy’s output is hard to track. His critical reputation rests on works since lost to weather, demolition, vandalism—or shredders. Although he courted arrest many times as a graffiti artist, Banksy might find that he has more freedom to create as Robin Gunningham, also known as David Jones, also known as head of his own company, Pest Control Office, whose mission is to authenticate Banksy’s art and protect his brand. The artist who once derided the idea of copyrights now employs a staff and legal advisors to root out fakes. It would appear that Banksy now finds that he is less interesting in tagging underpasses and more interested in his legacy. What’s in a name? I guess that depends on how much perceived value there is in an artist’s mystique.
Other than snide comments, do you have a point of view? All that I can glean is that you respect the dollar and the traditional values it represents, but fault Banksy's integrity for not living in some world apart from the real one.